The Dark

This week was all about the weather. Here in central New Jersey we had terrific storms that have left in their wake dramatic devastation. Many roads were made impassable by floodwater or fallen trees uprooted by hurricane-like winds. Arboreal debris is scattered everywhere. The big wind and rains began on Friday and continued, with some intermission, for more than two days. Our electrical power was cut mid-morning on Saturday. Much of Princeton Township didn’t get it back until Tuesday afternoon. We were luckier. Ours returned on Monday afternoon, after two highly instructive days, and especially nights, that offered much food for thought.

I have spent much of my adult life trying to imagine with some particularity the actual texture of human life in the Old World, before modernity. My particular focus has been the European Middle Ages; but I use the term Old World for a much more vast expanse of time that in no small part of the world continues to this very day. I have tried to convince my students that much of what makes our own world so very different from that of Homer or Dante or Milton is of quite recent origin. The “alterity” of the past—a fancy historical term meaning, roughly, differentness—is everywhere connected with often forgotten changes in material culture less than a century old. Our ancestors no more than three generations back could intuitively and naturally understand things in Chaucer that today need tedious footnotes to explain.

One example I have used is that of animal husbandry. The Old World was overwhelmingly agricultural. Most people lived in intimate association with the land, with its crops, and especially with the animals on which they depended for food, clothing, and labor. Cows, sheep, pigs, poultry—these were the necessary and ubiquitous extensions of human community. There is a big difference between a milk cow or a porker shoat and a family pet, the only domestic animals known to most Americans, and only to some of them at that. People in the Old World typically demonstrated an attitude toward animals, as well as a detailed knowledge of their characteristics, very different from our own. Some years back I read that an ordinary farmyard chicken had been placed in the Bronx zoo. I suppose, in fact, that the vast majority of living Americans, despite a huge national consumption of what Frank Purdue is shameless enough to call “chicken”--have never actually seen a barnyard full of squawking poultry. But Chaucer had seen many such barnyards. His story of the rooster Chaunticleer and the hen Pertelote in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale absolutely assumed that you have too. Otherwise all the chicken singing, all the chicken sex, and above all the chicken oneiromancy loses half its humor. (Even at fifty percent power, it’s still a scream.)

A yet more dramatic example, perhaps, and one more relevant to my recent weekend, was the experience of the dark. When the sun set in the Old World, people were in the dark. They perforce “went to bed with the chickens”, in a phrase still used in rural communities. Most could afford no candle or oil lamp; for a few there might be at best a faint glow from the expertly banked embers of a hearth fire. Practically nobody in our modern world is in the dark they way that everybody then was in the dark. I mean really in the dark—no circuit breaker, no flashlight, no matches, no blue cell-phone glow, no vaguely lucid penumbra of distant city’s lights. The electrification of rural America was still in progress in my youngest days, spent on an Ozark farm where the only nocturnal illumination came from kerosene lamps. And that was in the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt! There was electricity in the little town six miles away, and among my earliest memories was the awe of first seeing a Christmas tree decorated with lights. The social revolution that came with electricity is enshrined in one of the obiter dicta of the last century’s most famous revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.”

Two rather scary, stormy nights illuminated only by a couple of candles and flickering hearth flames reminded me how utterly and unthinkingly dependent we are on we so blithely call “energy”. The experience reminded me, too, of what must necessarily be for us the diminished power of the recurrent images of light and dark that everywhere thicken and enrich our early literature.

Think, for instance, of the opening scene of the Divine Comedy. It presents us immediately with a an uncertain and fearful wanderer:

Nel mezzo del camin de nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
Che la diritta via era smarrita.

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood
for the straight way way was lost.
(Hollander and Hollander)

The very thought of this dark wood is so fearful to the narrator that (he says) even death itself is hardly more frightful than its memory. Now it is obvious that the scene is "allegorical". The pilgrim is morally "lost"; his indecision and fear are obvious elements of an infirm moral condition that the poet presents as the large problem to be addressed in his poem. But the justest image the poet can find, and one he knows will have a universal resonance with his readers, is the image of darkness. What "perdition" means is being lost in that hellish realm described by Milton as "darkness visible."

Another great poet of the Old World, two centuries later, seems at times nearly obsessed with the dread power of darkness. I refer, of course, to Shakespeare. There are literally hundreds of moral images of light and dark in his plays, but no scene is more pregnant nor more horrible than the murder of Desdemona (Othello, V, ii). Othello is a Moor, his young wife Desdemona the daughter of a Venetian senator. A racial theme is not entirely absent from the play, but it is incidental and decorative. A modern historical predicament of which Shakespeare could have had no inkling usually distorts contemporary productions of the play at the expense of its actual and universal moral themes.Othello is a great military officer but also a jealous fool pitifully manipulable by Iago, who persuades him of his innocent wife's infidelity. What he himself only too late comes to see as madness drives him to murder her. In one of the most terrifying moments in our literature Othello, carrying a candle, enters his sleeping wife's darkened bedchamber. Understanding his remarkable soliloquy requires a little philology. The principal meaning of "light" in early English was not abstract but concrete. It meant candle or lamp.

Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men
Put out the light, and then put out the light:
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me: but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can by light relume.

The first "light" is of course the candle; but the second "light" has a double valence. Othello principally means by it Desdemona's life. That is the "light," impossible to "relume", that he will extinguish. But it is also the light of his own reason, the deiform faculty that the Old World believed was the image of God in humankind. Shakespeare is distant from Dante in some superficial ways. On the essence of moral reality they are twins. They naturally turn to the same powerful images already ancient in the Scriptures. "The light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended [overpowered] it not," writes Saint John. Pick up any book published by the Oxford University Press. Look at the logo, which they still have not quite had the moxy to discard: Dominus illuminatio mea, "the Lord is my light."

For Goya, "the sleep of reason produces monsters". In perhaps the most famous of his terrifying Caprichos a whole dark world is invoked by sinister night birds and a cat--an animal believed in the Old World to be able to see in the dark. For a couple of nights, lying in a cold bed at nightfall, suddenly deprived of every distraction and comfort brought by electricity, listening to the wind howl through trees that I reasonably feared might at any moment be felled upon my roof, I briefly had a few Old World moments.

Reading "The Politician", by Andrew Young

Many years ago a cynical senior colleague, Professor Famous, noting with displeasure several scholarly books lying open or bookmarked on my chaotic desk, gave me the following advice. “There are two kinds of professors. Those who read books, and those who write books. The ones who write books are the ones who get ahead.” Though in my scholarly career I persevered in my perversity of trying to chew gum and walk at the same time, I have without realizing it fallen into Prof. Famous’s pattern when it comes to blogging. I do read one blog religiously. The inspirer of my blog was my number-one son Richard and I continue to follow his bizarrely named but invariably rewarding “Brooklynite on the Ice” (http://www.antarcticiana.blogspot.com/).

There are two important Richard Flemings in my life, but only one of them is my son.

Rich is a man of parts—writer, world-traveler, craftsman, humanitarian, linguist, disk jockey, “chronic relaxationist”, recording engineer. If only he would master the épée and the fourth declension I could call him a Renaissance man. One of several features of antarcticiana I propose to emulate is the free-lance book review. Every so often Rich mounts a post entitled “Reading [Whatever Engaging Book He’s Been Reading].” Since he reads a lot of interesting books, this is one of his blog’s best features.

I rarely buy a current best seller, even at 40% discount, but I had been fascinated by the hype surrounding this one and trundled out to Barnes and Noble. Unfortunately “Reading The Politician, by Andrew Young” will concern a lousy book about really lousy people; but in a sense the lousiness is the whole point. You probably already know that The Politician is a “tell-all” memoir, an exposé of the presidential candidacy of John Edwards, which crashed and burned in the pages of the National Enquirer, when reporters from that supermarket tabloid cornered him in the men’s room of a fancy Beverly Hills hotel where he had gone in secret to visit his New Age girlfriend and their recently arrived “love child”.

Let me face my first digression manfully by saying that this term (“love-child”) is ridiculous. All children are, or should be, love-children. The way you make babies is by making love. Now that nearly forty percent of all American babies are born to unwed mothers could we not usefully revive the technical term bastard? Being a bastard never impeded Don Juan of Austria. Do you really think a “love child” could have won the Battle of Lepanto? Leonardo da Vinci, love-child? Alexander Hamilton? Lawrence of Arabia, for Heaven’s sake?

Though the sexual stuff fuelled the story and the TV interviews, it is actually less sleazy than a good deal else in the “Edwards saga”—a book-jacket phrase coined by somebody who’s never read a saga, obviously. John Edwards was prepared to do anything, and I do mean anything, to become President of the United States; but volition is not the same thing as capacity, and he was incapable of exercising good taste in women or in fast-food restaurants, which appear to have been the two dynamos of his cupidity. The four hundred dollar haircuts, the five million dollar house (“Thorstein Veblen Hall”) are proclamations of entitlement rather than sheer vulgar iniquity. I began this book thinking that Edwards must be a contemporary version of Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, a southern politician in whom there struggled some great and fascinating complexity, a tragic irresolution of ends and means, a noble moral vision mired in the bog of American political reality. But that was an insult to Willie Stark. It’s hard to give political hypocrisy a bad name, but John Edwards managed to do it.

John and Elizabeth Edwards are foul enough for a whole mini-series, but the really creepy people in this book are their enablers. I had never before heard of Fred Baron or Bunny Mellon. Had you? Fred Baron (now departed) was a super-rich Texas lawyer, the “King of Torts,” the Rainmaker’s Rainmaker. Mr. Baron thought it would be a very good thing for the world, beginning with the trial lawyers, if John Edwards (a kind of Subaltern or Cadet of Torts in his own right) were to become President. Or Vice-President. Or Attorney General. Whatever. To this end he was willing to make available his private jet, his Aspen mansion, and several hundreds of thousands of his superfluous dollars so that Rielle Hunter could disappear from the public view for a season while she had a baby. “Bunny” Mellon (Rachel Lowe Lambert Lloyd Mellon), the widow of my own benefactor Andrew Mellon, is a celebrity horticulturalist who is older than God and twice as rich. She was much smitten with John Edwards and thought it a pity that the press was hassling him about four hundred dollar haircuts and other political necessities. So she arranged to supply him, off the campaign books, several more hundreds of thousands of dollars, no questions asked, and certainly none answered. A good deal of this went to assuage Ms. Hunter’s difficult accouchement.

John Edwards (Il Penseroso) Fred Baron (L'Allegro)

To your worries about the undue political influence of corporations you might now add some concern about the undue influence of filthy rich individual meddlers and entrepreneurs. One has to assume they exist, in actuality or in potential, behind all major candidates. Then there are the true apparatchiks, the “political strategists” and professional “campaign workers.” I was interested to learn, for example, that David Alexrod, the unelected expropriator of my granddaughters’ lunch money, is a retread from the Edwards campaign.

But Creep in Chief is the author, Andrew Young himself. Even for a North Carolina lawyer he exhibited a breathtaking moral opacity. Never letting his eye stray from the main chance—the possibility of becoming a scullion in the household of Pharaoh on Pennsylvania Avenue--he served John and Elizabeth Edwards with a mind-boggling constancy. He was just a guy who couldn’t say “no”. Much of his demeaning vassalage was exercised in the presence of his wife and young children. He became famous for agreeing to claim paternity of the “love child”; but this was one of the nobler and more interesting of his tasks. The stuff that makes the reader cringe is the lickspittle domestic servility, the fetching of sandwiches from Arby’s or trying to score a Play Station at Walmart’s.

Young is forthright in stating his motives for writing the book. They include the obvious. He needs the money, since he is now “unemployable”. Edwards promised him the moon. If the moon weren’t available, he’d have to be content with a mere constellation—the executive directorship, for life, of a philanthropic foundation to be bankrolled by Bunny Mellon. By the end of it all his best offer was a positive letter of recommendation!

As usual Shakespeare said it best, in some famous lines from King Henry VIII. Old Cardinal Wolsey, after a hundred fetch-and-carry missions to his own Renaissance Arby’s, was shafted by the king. Things were rather more serious in those days, as they turned you over to the tender mercies of the headsman rather than those of the paparazzi. But Wolsey got it:

Had I but served my God with half the zeal

I served my king; he would not in mine age

Have left me naked to mine enemies.

Nor, of course, encouraged him to write a “tell-all” memoir.

Dangerous Reading

Blog day has arrived, and once again I have been so preoccupied with life as to have neglected art shamelessly. If you will forgive a comparison between things minute and things much greater, I once again I find myself in the situation so frequently faced by Dr. Johnson in the eighteenth century. Johnson was one of our language’s greatest journalists, and one of the very first Englishmen to earn a living almost entirely from his writing. Journalism used to have something to do with journals, and journals (as any graduate of French 101-A) will know, has something to do with jours (days). To digress only a few steps more, it should be obvious that our word journey must be a cousin to journalism, a journey once being the distance one could walk in a day.

In any event Johnson always faced deadlines on a weekly basis, and he often faced deadlines on a daily basis. Whether weekly or daily, however, his modus operandi was unchanged. He would often begin writing his pieces only when the printer’s devil arrived importunately at his door to pick up finished copy to take back to the shop.

Thus I begin. The entry will be anecdotal, as so much great journalism has been over the centuries. I have a very clear idea of the subject matter, but I am at a loss for a title. Three possibilities: (1) “Physics and Fatality”; (2) “When Inanimate Objects Animate”; or (3) “How Harriet Beecher Stowe Gave Me a Fat Lip”. Of course the readers of this blog, being a highly select group, are probably capable of coming up with something better; and I invite them to do so.

First, however, a literary quiz. How many of you recognize the following dialogue from an opening scene of a great twentieth-century novel? If by any chance you have not read this great book, I advise you to do so soon.

"Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has not only bought it, but has already spilled it. So the meeting will not take place..."

Mikhail Bulgakov

Here’s a hint. The speaker is actually the Devil, well disguised, of course, and travelling under the name of “Woland”; the person he is addressing is a somewhat Faustian Soviet literary critic named Berlioz. Berlioz has no idea what Woland is really telling him: namely, that he, Berlioz, will very soon be decapitated. How could he know? He has no idea who Annushka is, not that it matters, and he rarely if ever contemplates the fashion in which an oleaginous substance might modify the wonted friction of a shoe sole against a pavement. No, Belioz’s mind is fixed not upon the fatality of physics but upon flimsier literary matters.

Indeed so was mine, a few days past, when I set out to recover a striking passage I half remembered reading in Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days. It was the story of a nurse attached to one of the Union hospitals in the Civil War.* This woman died and, by her own request, was given a military burial among the men to whom she had ministered.

I keep my volumes of the “Library of America” on two of the upper shelves of a tall bookshelf in the dining room. I have them organized according to a private system, roughly though not slavishly chronological, with occasional thematic medleys. One of these is the Civil War, which happens, at the moment, to be center-right on the very top shelf, barely accessible even to my long reach.

The space allotted is finite; yet the admirable productions of the Library of America continue to appear. The results, in my household, are a very tight fit and even some double shelving. I had to pull rather hard to release the Whitman volume from its crowded spot between General Grant and Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe—or, as it turned out—between a Rock and a Hard Place. I had to pull so hard, in fact, that three books came out of the shelf, but only one in my hand. With the lightning reflex and native athleticism of my vanished youth I was able to catch Grant in my left arm and hug him to my breast. This left me, with both hands full, helpfully cooperating with the descending novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe, still in their strong and sharp-cornered box, by presenting my face to its full impact.

Harriet Beecher Stowe is most famous for having written Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book that had a tremendous impact on American public opinion concerning chattel slavery. It was with reference to this book that President Lincoln, upon being presented to the author, is supposed to have asked the following question: “Are you the little lady who wrote the book that started this great war?”

“Little lady,” indeed! Let me tell you, this “little lady” gave me a fat lip. Don’t mess with her. She’s deceptive, like the Monty Python rabbit. Next time I’ll take my chances with General Grant.

*She was 'A lady named Miss or Mrs. Billings'”. See p. 754 of the Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, as I eventually did, following emergency first aid.

The Lays of the Land

Laying out the Presidential Plan, wherein lies a recycled blog

“Well, our bill has been laying on the table for months. If the other side has ideas, the American people deserve to hear them.” In such feisty terms did a leading Democratic politician describe the state of play of the alleged “health care debate”. I voted for President Obama. As an English professor my hopes for the new administration were more eccentric, but also more realistic, than those of many of my fellow electors. I was not taken in for a moment by the promise of change I could believe in; what I did hope for was presidential grammar that I could tolerate.

There has been, happily, marked improvement. How could there not have been? One might wish that at some point during his elite education the president had learned that the first-person pronoun “I” (among his favorite words, after all) is a nominative form, and that he really ought not to use it as the object of transitive verbs or in such prepositional phrases as “for Michelle and I”. But this is a venial sin, and compared with his predecessor, who appears to have assigned the theory of the complete sentence to the same category of dubious hypothesis as that in which global warming might be found, Mr. Obama is a dignified speaker.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for his “spokespersons,” as they are now called. Mr. Gibbs is particularly inarticulate; but I entertain the dark suspicion that there is not a person in the White House who can distinguish between the verbs lay and lie. How well I remember the witticism of Mrs. White, my ninth-grade English teacher. The bill is laying on the table, indeed! Whenever one of us uttered a Gibbsism she shot back: “Hens lay. Politicians lie.

It’s a lost cause, but now and again I still fight back. Some time ago, under doctor’s orders, I underwent a “stress test” at an “imaging center”. The purpose of the test, apparently, is to gauge the functioning of the coronary arteries at a time when the exercised heart is beating rapidly. That part of the test, involving a simulated trot up a 14-degree slope on a treadmill, presented little difficulty. The real “stress” was elsewhere. First of all a nurse sticks a horse-needle into the crook of your arm. I am used to nurses who have difficulty finding the right vein. This one was challenged to find the right arm; but he eventually achieved the desired conduit for injecting what the doctor himself, who now arrived on the scene preemptively annoyed, called “the radioactive stuff”.

“This may feel a little cold in your arm, but it has no side-effects and no after-effects. Lay down on the table,” (pointing) “legs that way”. Perhaps if Dr. Goodscalpel had said the magic word “Please” my professorial resistance would not have been engaged; but he didn’t. “Lie,” I said. “Please lie on the table.” He took on an expression in which grumpiness contested the field with dull incomprehension. “Lay is a transitive verb,” I explained. “You pick something up, and you lay it down. Chickens lay eggs. ‘Lay down your arms, and come out with your hands up.’ That sort of thing. Lie is intransitive. ‘Amaryllis lies upon her fragrant bed of myrtle.’” That is a pretty far-out line under the best of circumstances, but if the only Myrtle known to you is your wife’s cousin it apparently becomes kinky as well. But all he said was “Lie, lay—what’s the difference?”

I had of course, just explained the difference; and society should be concerned that a man who finds it inconsequential is licensed to pump me full of “radioactive stuff,” let alone reorganize all of American health care. Distinctions in the lay/lie word families are not insignificant, as I then tried to demonstrate by pulling out my one famous author story.

W. H. Auden, circa 1959

One evening in 1959 the great poet W. H. Auden was in my rooms at Oxford. He was slightly drunk, and indeed spilled most of a bottle of port over four volumes of my Cambridge History of English Literature. (Purple stains of such provenance somewhat removed the opprobrium of the words “Cheap Edition” that were actually gold-stamped on the books’ backs.) Mr. Auden also autographed my own cheap Penguin edition of his collected poems and made a few corrections in the printed text, leaving me with a “rarity” that only increases in value as his fame grows. These very poems, he told me, had very recently been translated into French. “How do you like the translation?” I asked. “For the most part it is exshellent,” he slurred. “I have found only one serious mistake…” He paused for effect. I effected. “Yesh…I had used the perfectly fine old American expression a good lay…”

“And…” I asked.

“And it is rendered as un grand poème!”

“What’s your point?” asked Goodscalpel.

A Marked Man

No place of grace for those who avoid the face

No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice.

T. S. Eliot, ‘Ash Wednesday’

I suppose there are many things to say in favor of Greenwich Village, but just at the moment I have one in particular, and it is this. A conservatively dressed, elderly white man walking down Bleeker Street at nine o’clock in the morning with a large, sooty cruciform smudge on his forehead attracts no attention. None at all. Zero. In fact the facial decoration fits in surprising well, considering that it lacks any hint or gleam of metal.

Still, it is a little disconcerting to have to walk for ten or fifteen blocks in that condition, houseled, aneled, but unabluted, so to speak; and I was relieved to get to a washbasin. The Ash Wednesday liturgy is perhaps no more paradoxical than most religious rites, but it does have a fiercer irony. First a priest reads out a passage of the gospel in which Jesus says some hard things about people who make an ostentatious display of their religiosity, as, for example, by praying loudly on street corners or by hiring a guy to walk in front of them blowing a trumpet as they hand out quarters to homeless street people.

I pause to note that this part is actually rather comforting, just as I have always found comfort in the second of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt make no graven image.” Because, by God, I never have made a single graven image, not one! Nor have I ever hired a guy with a trumpet. But the next thing Jesus says is really harsh. “When you fast, don’t be like the hypocrites. They disfigure their faces so that people will know that they are fasting.” Having gotten that one out of the way the priest then dips a thumb into a pot of powdered black ash and then, with a kind of disfigure-eight motion, smears it all over your forehead while offering the following cheerful advice: “Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” You then get to go out and wander around among your fellow citizens as a marked man.

It is probably my tendency to hypertextuality, an undue sensitivity to the authority of the written word, that has caused me, ever since I was a child, to head for the soap and water as soon as possible. Many of my co-religionists seem to have no difficulty reconciling the ashen face with the gospel text. In fact, by the time I got on the train to leave New York this morning there were smudgy folks all over the streets of Manhattan, and quite a few in Penn Station. Some people, indeed, apparently feel no self-consciousness about it at all.

This photograph, I know, looks like one of those contests dreamed up by the New Yorker in which you are asked to supply an appropriate caption for a blank cartoon. Mine would be: “I was born in Scranton. Everybody in the family was a coal miner.” It is actually the vice-president of the United States hard at work, as always, on behalf of ordinary working Americans.

The reminder of one’s dusty nature is doubtless salubrious, but if you are of an age at which you are pretty sure that the large mound vaguely to be discerned on the horizon is the dust heap, it can be a bit of a downer. As a society we have pretty much decided that Mardi Gras is great so long as it doesn’t have to be followed by a Mercredi des Cendres; and we have applied that notion, disastrously, to our economic life. I had in fact come to New York for a fortuitous Mardi Gras meal of sorts. I am a member of a peculiar and old-fashioned club, the only purpose of which is to hold monthly dinner meetings at which the members, dressed in dinner jackets or elegant gowns, sit around a circular table having elevated conversation. We happen to meet on the third Tuesday of the month. With the exception of myself and one or two others who seem to have been elected by typographical error, it’s a very distinguished and erudite group, and last night’s conversation was particularly lively and enlightening. Young Shakespeare, too, as he knelt in the Stratford parish church, would have been told “dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.” His greatest tragedies demonstrate how well he appreciated that sentence. But he knew also another truth, to which he had his Sir Toby Belch give amusing voice: “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?”

Bring back the bad old days

Disparate circumstances account for this week’s post. The first is that President Obama, in his recent “State of the Union” address briefly touched in interesting ways upon some questions relating to higher education—the “field” in which I made my career. The second is that I awoke to a snowbound world. Very little is moving yet. The University is actually closed, except for “critical activities”, a category that does not include any classroom teaching, let alone my usual matutinal swim. So I am home, where I shall no doubt remain, especially as the blizzard is supposed to continue through much of the day.

President Obama announced his plans to make higher education more accessible to more young people. Like other proposals in the speech this one stimulated a certain amount of secondary commentary. One strand of commentary—which I have now seen in several versions—is that “higher education should be a right, not a privilege.” There is a parallel here with the claim that has emerged during the current “health care debate”: that for Americans health care should be a right and not a privilege. The concept of higher education as an American birthright, is a fascinating one, and I shall hope to address it within the next month or so. In my opinion, however, there is an obvious prior question.

American higher education is one of the wonders of the modern world. In an age when American manufactured goods are rapidly disappearing from competitive world markets, our colleges and universities remain the envy of the nations. There is probably not a graduate engineering program in this country that could stay in business without its large cohort of foreign engineering students, especially from places like China and India, the very places that are our most ferocious industrial competitors. It takes only half a minute’s reflection to see that there is as much bad news as good news in those enrollment statistics; so for the moment concentrate on the good.

But first things first. There are at present no laws mandating higher education in America, whereas laws in every state establish a requirement of universal public education for children. And when we turn to primary and secondary public education, it is an entirely different story. The proper context here is the cohort of advanced industrial nations, and within it American public education rates somewhere between the mediocre and the pathetic. It was indeed apparent to me for the last several decades of my teaching career that one of the most pressing problems in American higher education was the quality of American secondary education. Before we start worrying too much about whether every American needs a college education, we might do well to try to guarantee that they get a high-school education.

The principal engine of American success has been education. Obviously our colleges and universities here play a great role, but not in fact the greatest. The greatest role has been played by our system of public schools in creating a large educated population. Both of my parents were high school graduates. They often spoke of themselves, in terms of pride, as high school graduates. All that seems like a vanished age. I cannot actually remember the last time I heard anyone say with pride, “I am a high school graduate”. For the truth of the matter is that the concept of the “high school diploma” is increasingly meaningless. My parents knew some Latin. They had studied history, and especially American history, with some breadth. They remembered some algebra. Above all they knew how to read and write the English language. My father, a manual worker all his life, had beautiful “penmanship”, and I treasure the few pieces of his handwriting that have survived. They had read some Shakespeare plays, and knew why Shakespeare might still be important.

As an English professor at Princeton I had the opportunity actually to teach English and American literature to students who, for the most part, were eager to study it and prepared to do so. That was a luxury at least half the English professors in this country do not have. Most of what is taught in the first two years of “college English” in many institutions, and all of what is taught in some, is elementary work that used to be expected of any sixth grader. Remember that fact the next time your local school board boasts about how many computers they have put in the high school. It is quite possible to graduate from high school in this country without having the slightest idea of what an independent clause might be.

I am not really a military history buff, but I do try to read everything that appears in the wonderful “Library of America,” and thus a few years ago I read the memoirs of William Tecumseh Sherman. Sherman was born in 1820 on the frontier in the Western Reserve. He graduated from West Point in 1840, and immediately took up his varied and adventurous career in the military service of the maturing Republic, the most famous episode of which was destined to be the march “from Atlanta to the sea” in the late autumn of 1864.

The book is beautifully written in forceful, unpretentious, limpid prose. Where did this man of action, who spent so much of his life in the saddle or in rough bivouacs, whose chief literary production for most of his life consisted in bureaucratic reports and military communiqués, develop such a distinguished style? Well, he was in the first place a voracious reader, especially (we are told) a reader of the English Bible, of Shakespeare, of the great classical and eighteenth-century historians (Livy, Gibbon), and of the great contemporary novelists—meaning, at mid-century, Charles Dickens or Herman Melville. Sherman was in fact a college graduate—he graduated sixth out of a class of forty-three at West Point—but he got his essential education in primary and secondary schools in the backwoods of Lancaster, Ohio in the 1830s. What did Sherman study in his rustic academy, described as “the best in the place; indeed as good a school as any in Ohio”? Mathematics, chemistry, physical theory, geography (including navigation and cartography), and accounting, among other things. “We studied all the common branches of knowledge,” writes Sherman, “including Latin, Greek, and French.”

At that time Lancaster, Ohio, was a frontier outpost on the edge of a wilderness still largely occupied by Indians. Sherman was describing the experience of youngsters of the age of thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen. “At first the school was kept by Mr. Parsons; he was succeeded by Mr. Brown, and he by two brothers, Samuel and Mark How. These were all excellent teachers…” Perhaps our educational system could do with a little less “progress”? I recommend some thoughtful, targeted regression.

Homecoming

There are certain dates that are likely to ring a bell for even the most casual of historians among us. For Americans July 4, 1776, is one of them. Most people could at least successfully guess the association of October 12,1492. Surely you recognize December 7, 1941, still and forever living in its infamy. Expand your horizons just a little; include western Europe. How about the famous “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month”—i.e., eleven in the morning of November 11, 1918? As for the Quatorze Juillet—July 14, 1789—it’s child’s play. But what about July 29, 1881?

That is a little harder, perhaps? July 29, 1881 is a date that separates the sheep from the goats, or at least the frogs from the toads. Anyone living in Paris, as I have been doing for the last several months, encounters this date every day, and usually many times a day. For it was the day on which the famous law of July 29^th was adopted by the French legislature. Curiously, neither I nor any of the numerous Frenchmen I have interrogated on this subject has ever actually read the law of July 29^th; but we all know what it must say. It is the world’s most famous piece of anti-billboard legislation. Défense d’afficher. That

is so much more elegant than the awkward and usually ineffectual English version: “Post no bills”. Advertising posters are illegal on the city’s public surfaces. Parisians cannot hawk hamburgers from the walls of City Hall. Nor can Parisians promote diet pills in that manner. Since the only thing they can lawfully advertise is the law of July 29, 1881, they tend to do so on every possible occasion. And I presume the law is not subject to repeal, since it is literally carved in stone in numerous sumptuous public buildings and monuments.

I returned to America on Sunday afternoon, and the Americanness of America, for good and for not so good, immediately overwhelmed me. To the latter (not so good) category I had to assign the roadside pollution along Route 1, where there are hundreds of garish billboards, not a single one of which says “Loi de 29 juillet 1881”. But soon enough I was glad to have escaped that law’s clutches!

The latest evidence of the aging process is a severity of jet-lag I have never before experienced. Though exhausted nearly to the point of collapse, I could sleep only a few hours before awaking, unrested and still disoriented, in the wee hours. I got up and went through the motions of doing some work in my study; but by the time the actual dawn approached, it was obvious to me that it would be impossible for me to carry through with my plan of getting back to my daily early-morning swimming routine. Hence, it was only yesterday, Tuesday, that I managed to get to the gym. There, affixed to the wall at the end of “my” aisle of lockers, was the following violation of the law of July 29^th:

While I have no definitive proof of the perpetrator of this outrage, I have the strongest possible suspicions concerning a certain Dr. T. K. Chu of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. No knee-jerk liberal Miranda Rights for Chu. Gitmo now being off limits, I turned to the next best venue. Following our swim I interrogated him ruthlessly over a decaf double latte at the Small World Coffee Shop. Small World in Princeton, NJ, I am happy to report, is one of the few genuinely “Parisian” coffee shops in America. This means that ordinarily you have to take out a second mortgage to finance a double latte; but I made Chu pay for it.

They say that the second day of jet lag is the worst. That is probably true even if one does not, as one in fact did on this occasion, go into New York to see a three-and-a-half hour production of Simon Boccagnegra at the Metropolitan Opera. I was already disgracefully somnolent by the time of our pre-theater dinner with our dear friends John and Susan. By the time of the second intermission I was approaching the comatose. Joan actually secured a taxi in a snowstorm outside Lincoln Center. That’s the kind of aggressive New York street combat that usually rates two stars and an oak-leaf cluster, and it meant that we were able to get the last possible train to Princeton with at least thirty seconds to spare. I stumble into bed about 2:00 a.m.—that is, precisely twenty-four hours after last arising from it.

Hence I was unable to repeat my swimming triumph of yesterday. I didn’t even awaken until after daylight. I was at first inclined to interpret this as failure. But the enforced leisure, as it so often does, soon led to a more mellow view. I looked out of the living-room window, and I was pretty pleased by what I saw.

My sainted mother, dead these twenty years, used to give me advice, even when unsolicited. Perhaps you have such a mother—or are one. She used to say things like “You may live to regret that!” or “Handsome is, as handsome does!” Her apothegms annoyed me intensely. What annoyed me most of all, of course, was that they were invariably true. One of her favorites was “East, West, home’s best!” Given the particular homes involved, I was too often inclined to dismiss that as a defense of provincialism. But as I look about my study, I understand its full force.

As for swimming, there is always tomorrow. And as for a decent blog, there is always at least the possibility of next Wednesday.